REFRAME Blog

First things first, if you have NOT yet seen Black Panther, stop reading right now and go watch it. Yes, RIGHT NOW. Then come back later and read this.

OK second things second. A little bit about me: I am a Black Muslim woman that was born in Somalia and raised in Ethiopia, I immigrated to the United States when I was 11 years old. I am also a community organizer, actor and writer living in Seattle. This movie celebrates my identities and validates my dreams.

Now about the movie! This is going to sound cliché but Black Panther might be the best movie of all time (“might” just because Black Panther 2 might be even better). From the music to writing to the acting and directing and costume design, it was intentional and brilliant. There are a lot of important themes in this movie but there were three that stuck with me: the anti-colonialist, anti-white supremacist and pro-Blackness-of-all-kinds beauty of Wakanda, the importance of representation, and African vs. African-American discussions about belonging and home.

Immigrant rights organizations like Juntos, a Latinx grassroots group in Philadelphia, have been mobilizing powerfully in the months since Donald Trump took office. For Miguel Andrade, the communications manager at Juntos and a 2017 ReFrame mentee, strategic communications has played a critical role in their organizing work. “Right after the election, we knew the community needed to hear from us, so we put out the message that we’re not going to go back into the shadows, and we’re going to keep fighting,” Andrade said.

This year, Juntos began a campaign to establish community solidarity and safety, modeled after similar work in Arizona and Georgia. “We’re calling them ‘community resistance zones,’” Andrade said, noting that in Philadelphia (as in other cities), ICE has been ramping up their use of tactics such as targeting people’s homes and going to courts and detaining people at probation or immigration hearings. He added that the campaign is focused not only on immigrant detention, but the broader criminal justice system as well. “Philadelphia is a so-called ‘sanctuary city,’ but we still have stop-and-frisk happening, we still have cash bail. We need to highlight the fact that it’s two branches of the same corrupt tree that uses the same rhetoric,” Andrade said. “The immigrant detention system doesn’t work without the criminalization of Black and brown bodies. We can’t call ourselves a sanctuary city until all of us are protected.”

In the wake of the election, organizing and advocacy groups around the country have grappled with how to best take on the Trump administration and its policies. For statewide groups like New Virginia Majority and New Florida Majority, both of which focus on grassroots organizing and building power through strategic electoral work, they have doubled down on local campaigns and issues. For them, building local power and winning local campaigns is what will set them up for long-term, transformative victories.

“We’re clear that we’re not an organization that’s going to be centered on Trump,” said Jasmine Leeward, 2017 ReFrame mentee and the communications associate at New Virginia Majority. After the election, New Virginia Majority “made the decision to only respond if there’s a way we can center our folks on the state level,” Leeward added.

That doesn’t mean New Virginia Majority hasn’t been running campaigns that target the policies pushed by the Trump administration — since January, the organization has campaigned on everything from the need for immigration reform and the attack on DACA, to criminal justice reform, to environmental justice campaigns that target companies in the coal industry.

“We’re clear on who it is we’re fighting for, and who our audience is,” Leeward said. “We’re building a movement and building an electorate that can be sustained for the long-run.”

For 27 years, Cook Inletkeeper has worked to protect Alaska’s waterways and the life and peoplethat they sustain. According to Brandon Hill, the organization’s Communications Director and a 2017 ReFrame mentee, that work is always an uphill battle.

“Alaska is on the frontlines of our changing climate,” Hill said. Despite that, he explained, “We are also at the frontlines of fossil fuel extraction. Disappearing Arctic ice is even seen by the oil and gas industry as an opportunity for more wells.”

Alaska’s reliance on the oil and gas economy has, according to Hill, created division between those who work in or depend on the industry and those most impacted by it. “The state and the current realities of colonization have divided indigenous people and their cultures over these resources,” he added. “The story we need to tell is more than a need for clean energy, but for an entire shift of the climate change narrative towards racial justice.”​These factors make it all the more important to prioritize strategic communications in their work, Hill said. “We’re so often playing whack-a-mole with a focus on uniting around the bad,” he said. “We need to be strategic — what is the story we’re building and sharing, and who are we sharing it with?"